Sunrise Over Tiananmen Square

This was a weird film. THe main character's portrayal of life in Communist China since the revolution seems incredibly deluded. It seems to be an very glossed over view of history, almost as if his mind was brainwashed by the propaganda at the time. He blames the famine in the early 60's on the trade embargoes by various countries (the U.S., Russia, the UK) instead of the incompetence of the Chinese government in their disastrous quota system and the decision to get farmers to melt their tools in backyard furnaces to improve steel output (which ended up being useless anyway). He glosses over the disastrous effects of the cultural revolution. He pretends like life was perfect in China, there was no poverty or famine and that these evils only existed in capitalist countries. When the brutal truth of his government is presented to him during the Tiananmen square crack down in the early 90's, he complains that this wasn't the party that he knew. I kept expecting the narrator at some point to say "and then I realized everything I thought I knew had been wrong". But he never does, this is the reality that was presented to him as a youngster and at the time information was easier to control, and if you control the information you control the mind. Later on it is harder to hide the ugly side of communist China and when presented with it he somehow hints that the blame is on the reformists and the new bourgeoisie and not the government. Oh well, history and truth is whatever you believe it to be.

Artist Shui-Bo Wang narrates this story of his family's life in China during the rise of the Maoist Communist regime and provides us with some stunningly detailed illustrations to accompany his history. Essentially this is a one-man documentary that highlights just how willingly the largely rural and illiterate population engaged in the ideas of freedom and wealth redistribution. Of their belief that Mao's defeat of the post-Imperial Nationalist government would shine a new light for all the people, offering hope, equality, housing, food and jobs for all. He, himself, even ended up working for the military propaganda machine extolling just how superior their life was to the decadent West where children died, frozen, on the streets. In times when technology was very limited and freedom of expression ever more so, the power of his imagery cannot be understated. This was the true message because it was the only message, and few people knew what was actually going on anywhere else. When Mao dies and Deng Xaioping takes over, the state begins to relax it's authoritarian stance on many things, not least with it's relationships with other cultures. The influences of Michelangelo and Da Vinci begin to supplant the more traditional ones. It's this deregulation, though, that sees him sent to an agrarian community to teach, and where he discovers that after thirty-odd years of socialism, things have changed little. Poverty is an every day feature of life and this causes him to question his dogma. Not just him, but many more of his comrades who proceed to gather on Tiananmen Square in 1989 to protest for the freedoms they always thought they had, but now realise they didn't. He and his wife moved to North America after witnessing what he thought were impossible sights on the square and found a degree of success in the place he had always been taught to vilify. His delivery is a little dry and chronological here. There's not a great deal of passion heard, but the clever interweaving of artwork and photography provides us with a "Wild Swans" style of approach to a very personal history of a man, his family, his beliefs and is engaging to observe.

This documentary, comprised of archival newsreels, still photos, artwork by the director/narrator and other material, is a largely autobiographical look back at life for one man in The People's Republic of China. By extension, it looks back at China, because his life is enmeshed (as we all are, to one degree or another) by the society in which we grow and live. This lost the Academy Award to another very good work, The Personals, and although I like both works, I confess that I would have picked this one and I'm not really sure exactly why it lost out. It's a remarkable look at what was, for years, a closed society. One man recounts his journey through idealism and devout belief in the rightness of his society through his growing disenchantment and disillusionment, which led to his leaving China. This film could not have been made in China. It probably could not have been made easily in the United States, either, for different reasons. In China, it would be a crime to do so. In the United States, it would only be made if you managed to get the wherewithal to do the filming. But it was possible to do this here, whereas it would not be, even today, in China, at least not without great risk. Almost as great a testament to the human spirit as that sterling moment of grace under pressure, of the lone figure standing in front of the tanks one day some fourteen years ago, in Tiananmen Square. The human spirit is never destroyed-like all matter, it simply changes shape. This is yet another project produced under the auspices of the National Film Board of Canada. Exceptional piece of work and well worth tracking down. Most highly recommended.